Why MYSTERIES? Because that is the genre I read. Why PARADISE? Because that is where I live.
Among other things, this blog, the result of a 2008 New Year's resolution, will act as a record of books that I've read, and random thoughts.

19 August 2010

Forgotten Books: My Escape Hatch

This week's task for Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten BooksBooks we loved when we were between 18-23, college age. What book did you read when you should have been reading THE ODYSSEY and THE HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION?

Well, you see that was when I became an Agatha Christie addict. Officially I was plodding my way through English classics: an English lecturer who believed that if he read Spenser's Faerie Queene to us in old English we would understand "enough" and appreciate the beauty of the language, another who decided to analyse James Joyce's ULYSSES at the rate of a chapter each week and miraculously stopped appearing at lectures after 4 or 5 weeks, solid reads like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Restoration comedy, Shakespeare etc etc.

My escape hatch was Agatha Christie, newly available here in Australia in Fontana paperbacks, those lovely little green Penguins of Maigret titles by George Simenon, and Josephine Tey's DAUGHTER OF TIME.

Just think that nowadays, you can download Christie books and all kinds of lovely distractions to your cell phone. I'm not sure if I'd had that available as a college student, I would have passed my classes...